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Garda commissioner Drew Harris at a press briefing in 2020.
THE MORNING LEAD
Dublin city crime: statistics indicate return to pre-pandemic incidence of assault
A series of serious assaults have made headlines in recent weeks, and official crime statistics are known to under-report the scale of the problem.
A RECENT SPATE of assaults in Dublin’s inner city has made headlines and raised public and political concern about the handling and prevention of serious crime in the capital.
This weekend, a group of four British tourists were attacked as they walked through Temple Bar on Friday night. One of the four told The Journal that passers-by said to him that attacks “happen regularly here [in Dublin]… the doctor said that these incidents happen a few times a week”.
Last month, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee insisted she believed Dublin City was safe, but acknowledged that the capital had a number of problems that needed to be addressed with “a tough and firm” response.
Media reports have put incidents of violence and anti-social behaviour in the spotlight, raising awareness of the problem – but is crime in the city centre getting worse?
The Journal examined statistics on recorded crime in the Dublin Central North and South districts, from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) to find out. These Garda districts cover the city centre and several inner suburbs.
The statistics are recorded quarterly and taken from PULSE, the system gardaí use to record offences. However, the CSO publishes these statistics with a warning that the data might not be entirely complete and accurate.
The statistics tell a complicated story. They almost certainly under-represent the incidence of violent crimes such as assault. However, while the incidence of such crimes may have increased since the pandemic, it has probably not increased beyond pre-pandemic levels.
Recorded crime statistics from the first quarter of 2019 until the first quarter of 2023 – the most recent report – were examined.
Three categories of offences related to assault are recorded: “assault causing harm, poisoning”, “attempts/threats to murder, assaults, harassments and related offences”, and “other assault”.
Charting all three over the past four years, a noticeable downward trend during the pandemic can be seen, but by early 2022 the number of incidents had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The statistics indicate the incidence of assault has remained fairly consistent since the end of the pandemic.
An average of 81 assaults causing harm have been recorded by Gardaí in the Dublin North Central region every quarter since the first quarter of 2019 and 87 in the Dublin South Central region over the same period.
The first quarter of 2023 alone shows that 165 assaults causing harm were recorded by Gardaí in both regions in Dublin Central – this is the lowest number recorded since last year.
With every year’s quarter combined, 2022 saw the highest number of assaults recorded by Gardaí in Dublin Central since 2019.
Deirdre Healy, associate professor and director of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice in UCD’s School of Law, says that assaults tend to go under-reported to gardaí relative to other types of crime.
“It can create an inaccurate measure of what’s actually happening,” Healy said.
She added that a CSO survey in 2019 found that only 29% of victims reported such incidents.
“So, in relation to the crime statistics, you’re actually only capturing a small percentage of what’s actually going on,” Healy said.
Healy said that this “dark figure” of crime statistics has been a constant in the national records for a number of decades, and usually results in around 70% of assaults not being reported.
Last year, an average of 106.8 assaults causing harm were recorded every four months by Gardaí in both Dublin central regions combined. The highest level of recorded assaults in the city was 240 in the second quarter of 2022.
Between the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2023 a total of 78,086 offences relating to theft have been recorded by Gardaí in Dublin city – an average of over 4,500 every four months.
Healy confirmed that crime trends in Ireland suggest these types of offences, which are non-violent, are the most common in the state. She noted that it was also more likely that victims of this type of crime would report incidents to gardaí, leading to them being recorded in official statistics, because in most cases a garda report is needed for insurance purposes.
Eight categories of offences related to theft or robbery are recorded by the CSO: “Robbery from the person”, “Robbery of an establishment or institution”, “Robbery of cash or goods in transit”, “Robbery, extortion and hijacking offences”, “Theft and related offences”, “Theft from person”, “Theft from shop”, and “Theft/taking of vehicle and related offences”.
When charting all of the theft or robbery offences over the past four years, a similar noticeable decreasing trend during the pandemic can be seen, and once again, by early 2022, the number of incidents had reached just under pre-pandemic levels.
The statistics indicate the incidence of theft or relating, non-violent, has remained fairly consistent since the end of the pandemic.
However, Tony Gallagher, a recently retired Garda investigator and now an Event, Security and Risk Manager with Ashtree Risk Group, said he believes that regardless of the high records, theft is still underreported to Gardaí. Gallagher has worked with the retail sector since he has left An Garda Síochána.
Gallagher said: “There’s an underreporting of [theft] because [shopkeepers] feel that they don’t want to bother the Gardaí, because they know that they’re under-resourced.”
“I’m working with retailers to try and mitigate risk and part of that is to report that crime.
“When you get a great response [from gardaí], it’s a great morale lift to any retail staff member to see the presence of gardaí. I certainly know that gardaí want to be there, they want to be out in the streets, but they know they have very low resources.”
Gallagher said he believes Ireland has turned into a “confrontational society”, created by many social changes, such as a rise in homelessness and an increase in people living in poverty in the city centre and an increase in the population overall.
The fourth estate and crime
Media reporting of crime often fits into sensational narratives, simple situations and focuses on the violent and less frequent crimes that are committed, according to Healy.
This is supported by research in the 1990s by UCD’s Michael O’Connell which found that less serious offences received less coverage than extreme and violent offences despite being more prevalent.
Serious offences such as murder, armed robbery and manslaughter dominated news reports of crime despite accounting for a tiny proportion of recorded offences – less than one percent each.
O’Connell also argued based on his research that the media had certain biases, including a preference for narratives that fit the mould of “vulnerable victims and invulnerable offenders”.
Healy believes the way the media reports crime “can increase fear of crime and increase people’s perception of crime as a problem”.
“If people are fearful of crime and they expect to be victimised, that can have a real impact on their lives,” she said.
She urges more nuanced reporting to help keep the focus on longer term solutions, as well as the importance of giving victims a voice.
Garda response
Gallagher said there are depleting resources in the Gardaí to deal with crime on the frontline and he believes that the management should stop prioritising the fulfillment of specialist garda roles and focus on recruitment and retention instead.
“The first line of defence is always prevention. If you don’t have enough people in the front line preventing – then you’re going to spend more time investigating,” Gallagher said.
General Secretary of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI), Antoinette Cunningham criticised the model of policing in Ireland last month, claiming it was more focused on reactive policing over preventative policing.
“This is a model of policing that was adopted in 2018 by the Irish government who are fully aware that this model of policing is not creating a strong, visible police presence,” Cunningham said on RTE Radio’s This Week programme.
Last month, when McEntee met with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris and Deputy Garda Commissioner for Strategy Shawna Coxon, it was decided that more “proactive policing responses” would be taken.
This approach will involve more intelligence-led operations, including surveillance, searches of people and locations and “an increased focus on the congregation of large groups of people who can be perceived as engaging in anti-social behaviour”, according to the Department of Justice.
Additionally, it was also decided that weekly and daily reviews would take place in areas “prone to anti-social behaviour” under a new crime action plan.
Healy believes more focus on early intervention programmes would help kids who may be at risk of becoming involved in crime later on in life.
“The type of intervention programmes that push the problem off at the start, rather than trying to deal with it after it’s happened after it’s happened – that can be a much more effective solution,” she said.
